BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Sparing the microbiome

How Eligo is editing the microbiome with CRISPR

September 27, 2017 9:12 PM UTC

Eliminating disease-causing bacteria from the gut while sparing healthy commensal bacteria is one of the key challenges of creating microbiome-based therapies. Eligo Bioscience S.A.S. has a platform that couples the editing power of CRISPR with the selectivity of bacteriophages to produce targeted antimicrobial therapeutics for a range of microbiome-related diseases.

On Tuesday, Eligo announced a $20 million series A round led by Khosla Ventures, which included €2 million ($2.4 million) the newco raised in 2015. Chairman and CEO Xavier Duportet told BioCentury Eligo was launched in 2014 when groups at The Rockefeller University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “decided to join forces”, after showing in separate papers in Nature Biotechnology that bacteriophages delivering CRISPR-Cas9 constructs selectively killed species of Gram-positive or Gram-negative bacteria...